Click on the Google Preview image above to read some pages of this book!

An explosive novel of sex, secrecy and escape by an anonymous writer.

A woman disappears. Her car lies abandoned on a remote bluff; no body is found. She was the good wife, the good mother: mannerly, quiet, self-contained. But she has left behind an incendiary diary chronicling a disturbing journey of sexual awakening.

As the diary opens on her honeymoon in Morocco, she believes herself to be happy - or happy enough, anyway. Swiftly, this security masquerading as love fractures in an act of massive betrayal, only to propel her into a world of desire and fantasy and utter recklessness. What begins for her in the imagination ends in a tangle of sheets, in a drowning spiral of obsession and release. She finds an unlikely heroine to inspire her in a dusty, rare manuscript written by an anonymous woman in the 1600s, a cry from the heart for women to live and love freely. With this as guide, she dares to rupture convention, learning for the first time the intoxicating power of knowing what she wants and how to get it. The question is, how long can her soul sustain a perilous double life?

Coolly impassioned, The Bride Stripped Bare tells shocking truths about love and sex. These are the kind of revelations that best friends whisper to each other and then decide to forget they ever did so. Couched in a deceptively simple style, it will make you question whether it is ever entirely possible to know another person.

In the literary tradition of female rebellion comes The Bride Stripped Bare, an explosive account of one woman's sexual awakening and a meta-diary about the creation of a manuscript. The story begins and ends with notes from the narrator's mother, whose daughter has disappeared with her newborn son; her car and the baby's pushchair have been found near a cliff, but no bodies have been recovered. All that remains of the young woman is a manuscript that reveals to the grieving mother a daughter she now questions if she ever knew. This dramatic framework is secondary to the manuscript itself, a blistering, second-person narrative written by an author who never identifies herself by name, only by sharing her experience with the reader and therefore making her an Everywoman. Beginning her diary in Morocco, on her delayed honeymoon, the narrator stumbles into the hotel room and overhears her husband having an intimate conversation with her best friend. From that point on, her life changes. Her husband is a stranger; her best friend is gone. In trying to start again, the narrator embarks on a project: she decides to write an answer to the scandalous 16th-century feminist text that's been in her family for generations. She documents what women really want, meanwhile embarking on a steamy affair with a young Spanish actor and eventually living out her sexual fantasies with strangers. In finally achieving sexual satisfaction from others, she finds renewed interest in her marriage, appreciating her husband and strengthening her bond with him. The book ends with the birth of her baby, and the feeling of triumph that she could do something that her best friend could not: begin a family with the man they both love and find fulfilment in motherhood. The framework of the book, however, reveals the truth behind the myth that women only want to be mothers. This is a powerful and intelligent novel, with an unpopular message: that sex and love are not always the same thing, and that it is never possible fully to know another person - or oneself. (Kirkus UK)

Nikki Gemmell has written four novels, Shiver, Cleave, Lovesong, The Bride Stripped Bare and The Book Of Rapture, and one non-fiction book, Pleasure: An Almanac for the Heart. Her work has been internationally critically acclaimed and translated into many languages.

In France she's been described as a female Jack Kerouac, in Australia as one of the most original and engaging authors of her generation and in the US as one of the few truly original voices to emerge in a long time.

The French literary review "Lire" has included her in a list of what it calls the fifty most important writers in the world - the ones it believes will have a significant influence on the literature of the 21st century. The criteria for selection included a very individual voice and unmistakeable style, as well as an original choice of subject. Nikki Gemmell was selected along with such novelists as Rick Moody, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Froer, Rohinton Mistry, Tim Winton, Colum McCann, Michel Faber and Hari Kunzru among others.